Sprout Salad

I love food. All sorts of food. Even salads 🙂 I think salads can be a meal by themselves. They are healthy (for the most part), textural, delicious and sometimes surprising. And they don’t always have just leaves and veggies.

Growing up, ‘salad’ was cucumber, tomatoes, onions sliced and put on a plate. To be had along with the meal. Health+crunch. Just like every other house. Then we started including sprouts as a salad. We used to sprout the beans at home and then mix them with salt and lemon juice. Basic but tasty. This recipe is a more jazzed up version of that initial salad, something that I have made so many times for so many people over the years.

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Veggie Fried Rice (with brown rice)

Growing up, I loved eating Chinese food. The family would try chinese restaurants often, we would eat chowmein in school and we would make a few chindian (chinese+indian) dishes at home as well. The home favourites were chowmein and fried rice. Those days were special ones indeed! We would come home from school and realize it was chowmein or fried rice day and be thrilled to be bits to be having something different from the standard Indian fare 🙂

This fried rice recipe is a slightly more jazzed up version of what we used to eat at home. It’s a wee bit healthier as well since it uses brown rice inside of white, but feel free to use white if you prefer. It will still be as yum!

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Dry Kala Channa (Dark Chickpeas)

Growing up in Delhi, the Navratras were a big deal. Nine days where people ate vegetarian food or fasted, prayed (more) and abstained from alcohol. Our family doesn’t really follow this ritual, but we did enjoy the special food our friends ate during this time. It’s a time for buckwheat instead of flour, lots of potatoes, rock salt instead of regular salt, among other things – making for some pretty tasty food.

The best food though is on the 8th day, Ashtami, where there was a puja (prayer) for girls and everyone then got to eat puris, halwa and kala channa. Since we didn’t do the puja, we used to wait for our friends to share the food with us 🙂 Priorities are clear, food above rituals 🙂

This kala channa recipe is a modification of the ashtami once, with the addition of some tomatoes and ginger – garlic plus tweaking of the spices a little. But whenever I make it, it takes me straight back to those ashtami days!

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Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies have been my go-to for as long as I can remember. Growing up, we used to get only plain, vanilla biscuits for the longest time. But once the market opened up and people’s preferences became more varied, we started seeing a lot more ‘fancy’ cookies in the market. One of the first new types was the chocolate chip. It started off as the thinner, crisper variety (the recipe of which shall be up soon), but then also added on the thicker, chewier version. My aunts used to get the chewy chocolate chip cookies from the US as well – those were these super luxury goodies for us back in the day. And so delicious!

On my recent trip to New York, I tried a ton of cookies. Like really a ton. My favourite were from this bakery called Levain. BEST COOKIES EVER! Massive, thick, dense, chewy and full of chocolate in every bite. Heaven!

While these aren’t at that level yet (I promise to try to replicate those), these are pretty much bang on in terms of thick, chewy cookies. I ate way too many in the process of testing, all worth it, I say 😀

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Aloo Posto (Potatoes with Poppy Seed paste)

Welcome to another edition of ‘I love potatoes’ 🙂

Given how integral potatoes are to Bengali cuisine, it’s only natural that I share another of my favourite Bengali recipes, like I did with the aloo bhaja one earlier.

Aloo Posto is an iconic bengali dish. Pan fried potatoes mixed with a Poppy seed paste to give it that extra oomph. A little nutty, a little spicy and just so flavourful!

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